Boundary Breaking Neurologist

Photo: Dr. Alice Flaherty, STAT News.

It’s not ‘all in your head’: When other doctors give up on patients, a boundary-breaking neurologist treats them

BOSTON — Even beforehand — before the compulsive writing and the bipolar diagnosis, before the niche medical practice and the best-selling book — Dr. Alice Flaherty stuck out. She had grown up beside a duckweed-filled pond in rural New Jersey, and by the time she was a young adult, she’d become a neuroscientist in a family of engineers, a theorist among doers.

When she came home during breaks at Harvard, her father would rib her. “He’d say, ‘Yo, you talk big about pure science now, but you’re going to end up an engineer just like the rest of us,’” she recalled. “And when I went to med school, he was like, ‘See? See?’ And it’s totally true. It’s like tinkering. You tinker with the patients. It’s so fun. I love fixing broken machines.”